Glenna Luschei, Maria de la O,and Kendall McCook

Glenna Luschei’s latest book is The Sky is Shooting Blue Arrows from the University of New Mexico Press. She has published Solo

Press books and magazines for 50 years and will now be publishing translations. She spends her time between North Carolina and San Luis Obispo, California, where she was inducted as Poet Laureate of City and County in the year 2000.

Marsha de la O’s new book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, received the New Issues Poetry Prize from the University of Western Michigan and an Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has been anthologized in Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (Ballantine), and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems from California (Greenhouse Review Press). She is the recipient of the 2014 Morton

Marcus Poetry Award.

Kendall McCook is a poet and storyteller born in Clayton, New Mexico. He taught in Clayton, Springer, and Cimarron high schools

and farmed for many years in the Springer and Clayton area. He now lives in an old tree-shaded two-story house in the Fairmount Historical district in Fort Worth, Texas, and he spends much of the summer with friends writing and reading poetry in his homeland. His work celebrates the land and the people who live close to Mother Earth.

Poet, editor, and translator Glenna Luscheiwas born in the midwest but has lived in Colombia, New Mexico, North Carolina and California. She studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her MA in English at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln and her MA in Spanish at the University of California — Santa Barbara. She’s been the director of the performing arts and activist group India, Inc since 1975, and has worked as the editor-publisher of Solo Press since 1967. Her nineteen books include Back into My Body and New Poems (Mille Grazie P, 1994), Matriarch (The Smith, 1992), Shot With Eros and Pianos Around the Cape (Aspermont P, 1999). Of her Nebraska roots, she says, "I dream most about my grandfather's 'farm' in Furnas County near Beaver City where I lived as a child. He had come to Red Cloud in a covered wagon before the turn of the century and became the county defender, starting a family tradition that includes my brother John Stevens Berry and my son, Erich." She was named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo, California, where she lives. In midst of the 2001 celebration of Prairie Schooner, she announced a major gift to endow the editorship of the magazine. Of the gift, Prairie Schooner editor Hilda Raz said, "Glenna's philanthropy not only assures Prairie Schooner another 75 years and more of continuing vibrant life, but makes possible creative and interdisciplinary projects previously impossible to publish.”

Marsha de la O’s book of poetry, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and a Small Press Editor’s Choice Award. She is the winner of the dA Poetry Award and the Ventura Poetry Festival Contest. She has published in journals such as Barrow Street, Passages North, Solo, and Third Coast. She was raised in the Los Angeles area and now lives in Ventura, California where she is co-editor for the literary journal, Askew. She is currently working on a novel.

What artist inspires you?

Once when I was a very young woman working at the Huntington Library, a Virginia Woolf scholar I admired very much told me in some desperation that her cousin from Tennessee was on his way out to California for a reading at the library. She was afraid only a few people would attend. Would I come? Yes, absolutely, for her. The truth was I had never been to a poetry reading, but her plea galvanized me, filled me with an impulse to protect her cousin, especially from the local doyennes in the Junior League, who, I already knew, didn’t attend very deeply to anything. I found a seat up front, and listened with an intensity that bordered on sexual tenderness. A transport that plunged me into the dream excavation beneath the house where his father died, the poet working that ground under the floorboards, insinuation of root and must. And yet, a primary element of what I heard was light—his father staggering in, confused, the way the dead often are, one hand shielding his eyes. Grief, light, intimacy, death. The business of our hearts. His name was Charles Wright.